Sick of ice yet?

For day 54, one more ice cube shot. Last one I promise, at least for a while.

The reason is that I wanted a different treatment of a similar subject. Last time, I was blowing out highlights, and getting tightly cropped, so this time I went low-key and gave it some space in the frame:



Shot on black fleece which does a really nice job of killing any reflection, and it only needed very, very minimal cleanup of light spill. Basically, twenty pixels or so of gray right haloing the base of the glass, the rest of it is clipped. This was accomplished with the 580EX II off-camera, shooting down from above, and snooted with a Honl flexible snoot/bounce card.

The shot might have been better with a second point of focus, because otherwise there is just a lot of black, but so be it. It looks like I expected, good or bad.

Secret of the Ooze

Day 53 of my Project 365 rolls around, and I am sitting on a big pile of green, red and blue ice cubes. I can't help play around with them.

I wanted to see what they would look light heavily backlit, so I rigged up a clear plastic berry dish on some of my daughter's Megabloks (high tech all the way here) and used that to place my 580EX II underneath, triggered with my Pocket Wizards. Killed the lights, set up a black screen around it to keep out any ambient, and shot from above:



ISO 100, f/10, 1/60th shutter. I can't help it. Every time I see this, I think of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies. I have some other ideas for these cubes, so hope you don't mind a new shot with them every now and then. They are fun to play with.

On a more serious note, I am very, very close to registering a small business and trying my hand at some simple part-time portraiture work. Some of the people I have done shots for are prepared to give me referrals and it would help to finance some new equipment if I could write off purchases against that income. It's not an unreasonable idea... I hope.

A Splash of Colour

Day 50, and this has to be a quick post before I make dinner.

I finally found a flat-sided acrylic container to do more water shots with, and I had the idea to freeze some ice cubes with food colouring in them.

Add the two together, and this is the result:



f/25, ISO 100, 1/200th shutter. 580EX II on-camera at 1/2 power. I should have tried to lower the flash power and blow out the background more with a larger aperture, but I wanted to really freeze the action. Freeze. Ice. *snicker*

Really like this shot though. One of my best I think.

Zombies lurk here...

Day 49 dawned without a dawn. That is to say, I noticed that it was quite dark as I wandered out to the car this morning. A very heavy mist had rolled in, and visibility was limited to about two hundred feet or so. In the middle of the winter, this was a bit unexpected.

So, apologies to my carpool for running late today, but I got my project shot early!



ISO 100, .8 second shutter, f/8 at 55mm focal length on the kit lens.

Now, IS or no IS, a .8 second exposure is tough to handhold, but I wasn't going to run in for my tripod. In some instances, a little blur is not a bad thing, and I think this is one of those instances.

I really debating posting this shot at all, because in some way I think I've had 'sharpness' drilled into my head as a standard for a 'good picture'. Anything with a slightly missed focus, movement blur, handshake or whatever has been summarily discarded unless it was intended. I actually managed a shot of this scene with a better focus and less blur, but this is the one I came back to, this is the one I like, this is the one that feels claustrophobic, hurried, and lost.

This is the one that the zombies lurk in.

More shots for Defiant Racing

Here are the other keepers from my late night, really cold shoot for my friends racing team last night.

Comments and criticism are always welcome!

Go Canada, Go!

Hey guess what? Day 40 and I still can't seem to take night pictures.

Tripod? Check. Big aperture? Check. Slightly fuzzy, terribly exposed picture? Check.



70mm, ISO 100, f/2.8, 4 second exposure, on tripod.

I think the subject matter killed me here. This is the Royal Canadian Mint, and it is adorned with huge gold, silver and bronze medals. The contrast between the darker sections of the building and the lighter medals causes the colour to blow out however. Oh, poop.

Well, I gave it shot. Back to editing motorcycle pictures...

Winnipeg means snow!

For day 37, my temporarily beloved 24-70 and I went out to shoot light trails. Just one problem: Snow.

I do live in a winter city, so trekking through knee-deep snow to set up a tripod on a snow drift is just second nature, but for long exposures, it *kills* any sharpness you night have had. Add to that the slippery roads reducing traffic, and my light trail shooting had to be aborted early. I also don't have a weather-sealed body so I was using my hat to keep the body dry.

This is the best shot of the night:



Not terrible, but you can see the lack of sharpness if you look at the railing on the overpass, and not once did I manage to get traffic coming and going at the same time.

Today's lesson, take what you can get.

The rich part of town...

For day 35, a friend and I went down to Wellington Crescent during lunch to see what we could see. In the summer, I'll be returning there to shoot some of the grand old churches, but today was about frost, snow and things that are red.

I kept three pictures out of about 15 I took, and three of the four subjects I shot had keepers. My average is getting better.

Shot number one:



This old tree is in front of an old red brick building. You don't see a lot of brick in Winnipeg as the extreme hot/cold swings we get are very hard on them. In the wealthier parts of town though, brick rules. This building has had some modern HVAC bolted on to it and the exhaust blows right over this tree causing dense frost crystals to form.

Shot two is the result of the same exhaust:



I think I like this better than the branch shot, the depth of field adds an element, and the wonky leaning fence is kind of charming as well. It lacks in colour, but I think the sparkle of the frost would be lost in a monochrome conversion.

Finally, across the street is this view:



I'm an absolute sucker for repeating patterns and shapes, so these doors really caught my eye. I tried a few crops removing the road and/or the fire hydrant, but I like the way the road leads the eye across the shot. Your opinion may vary, please let me know if you think so.

All in all the 24-70 performed fairly well, but it's a beast of a lens to lug around.

The best seat in the house!

Day 32, and I swore I would take a picture *before* I got home. I like shooting macro, and playing in the lightbox is fun, but it's time to change it up, even if just for one day.

I had a subject in mind, but I wasn't sure how to frame it. I took a chance, shot two or three angles, and to my eye this is the best I managed:



I call it the 'Best seat in the house' but it's totally not. Irony! Technical details - ISO 100, f/4.5 and 1/400th shutter.

Composition in this shot really left me scratching my head, and it still is. There is a contrast effect between the fabric and snow that is nice, the graffiti on the wall is interesting but not distracting from the focus, but that's about it. Maybe I should have shot from closer, played with the perspective more. I'm not sure. This might be the subject of a reshoot later on.

This is where the back alley picture in this post opens into the parking lot, and you are looking back of a couple of hole-in-the-wall Chinese food restaurants. This couch appeared some time in November, and since then the snow draft has been fighting a battle of attrition with it.

I'm curious to see if the drift will completely engulf it before the melt hits.

I feel the need...

Day 29 of Project 365 and as always I was looking for inspiration.

Sometimes inspiration comes from a ray of light shining through a window, or a simple little object with striking colours. Sometimes, inspiration tries to beat a red light and just about kills you on the way home from work. Want to guess how my drive home was today?

Don't get me wrong, I'm hardly to worlds best driver. I'm not overly defensive, I can have a bit of a quick temper, and I really don't like driving around people who clearly aren't in full, confident control of their vehicle. Having said all that, I have two kids, and my driving habits have seriously mellowed since I started having little people in the back seat routinely.

Still, every now and then, you feel the need. The need for speed!



Taken in my driveway, ISO 200, f/11 at .8 seconds shutter, 25mm focal length. Although I have been using the 60mm Macro almost exclusively, there was no way I could frame the tach in my car from the front seat, so I switched over to the kit lens. Even with IS I had to brace the lens on the steering wheel, and take several shots before I got a nice sharp one. I wanted a larger blur on the needle, but this was the longest I could manage a handheld sharp shot, and I really didn't want to absolutely floor it in neutral.

All in all, I think I nailed this shot pretty well. It was over-exposed a bit, but easily corrected in post.

p.s. Yeah, it was -17 Celsius at 4pm in Winnipeg today. Brr.